Friday, March 18, 2016

Yep, that crack-up we've been hearing about for so long has arrived by digby

Grab a cool drink and settle in for a rolicking read from Richard Viguerie's Conservative HQ. This is getting so, so good:

While movement conservatives would like to blame the Republican establishment for the rise of Donald Trump and the attendant political problems he has created for the national Republican Party, as our friend Rick Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government, pointed out in a recent article for Breitbart, those whom we call “establishment conservatives” bear just as much responsibility for Trump’s rise.

And there is no better example of how DC’s snide elitist “conservatives” have helped create Trump than a recent cover article in National Review by one Kevin D. Williamson.

Mr. Williamson, who has apparently never done anything in conservative politics except pontificate for various elite journals, took to the pages of National Review, the foundational publication of the conservative movement, to explain in Malthusian terms why the “benighted white working class” that is powering the Trump movement should just blow away and die.

In Williamson’s formulation Trumpism is not just a bad set of ideas, it is “immoral.”

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

White workers who have lost their jobs and had their quality of life devastated by thirty years of liberal folly and establishment Republican cronyism with Big Business are immoral for wanting a government that will actually serve the interests of its citizens?

Williamson claims a moral high ground because in the D.C. ivory tower complaints about failing economic policies like the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact are “immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to [Republican presidential candidate Donald] Trump has been victimized by outside forces.”

It gets better. “It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that,” adds Williamson.

“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible,” he writes.

Williamson blames the very people who are undeniably the victims of a combination of big government regulation and disastrous trade policies that have traded manufacturing jobs for lower costs for those products.

In spite of his claim that “On the trade front, American manufacturing continues to expand and thrive,” the reality is that since the year 2000 when Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China went into effect, five million manufacturing jobs have been lost, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What’s more, the nation’s Gross Domestic Product growth has not exceeded 4 percent since that same year. In fact, GDP growth hasn’t exceeded 3 percent since 2005 making the past decade the worst for economic growth since the Great Depression.

This is not the fault of those who lived in those towns that depended upon local manufacturing that was shipped overseas, it is the fault of the government policy that put into place the environment where closing local mills in North Carolina made more economic sense than keeping them open.

It is the fault of government policies that dictated that incandescent light bulbs could not be sold in the United States, so General Electric (which lobbied for the ban) could close the Virginia plant that made those bulbs and replace it with one in China that makes the federal government mandated ones.

It is the fault of environmental regulatory policies that turned timber mill towns in the Northwest into ghost towns, and are currently in the process of shutting down coal mines and industries related to the coal business shuttering the life blood of towns all over Appalachia.

And it is the fault of a corporate tax system that makes it undesirable to invest in building things here in America.

The ugly truth that the self-righteous Williamson misses is that government policy has stranded millions of Americans economically, and pretending that if they just play Jed Clampett and load up their trucks and move to California all will be well is either deliberately disingenuous or downright cruel.

As we pointed out in our article “Is Donald Trump Samson Or Delilah?” the fellows at National Review, The Weekly Standard, Fox and other outlets that have been banging away at Trump’s lack of conservative intellectual bona fides haven’t borne the impact of Washington’s complete rejection of limited government constitutional conservativism.

None of them have been put out of work by an illegal alien.

None of them have had to train their H1-B foreign guest worker replacements.

Few have their children in public school rooms swamped with non-English speakers.

And few are subjected to the daily humiliations at the hands of politically correct bureaucrats, school administrators, and corporate managers that make them feel like strangers in their own country.

So little wonder that Trump’s message that he is going tear down the Washington establishment and the idea of an outsider candidate who is going to make America great again and is beholden to no one is a powerful attractant to the forgotten men and women of America’s country class.

As Rick Manning put it so well, those who would crucify blue collar workers on the corporate crony trade altar are no better than those who would sacrifice the same group to their green gods — they are both despicable.

With thinking like National Review’s, is there any wonder why the blue collar silent majority is revolting against the elites of both political parties?